YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Hulme

lines on the record: 75
first: 2026-03-19
most recent: 2026-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“One way I'd put that, Robert, that idea is that the cost of automation is declining very rapidly and the cost of verification in this broad sense we've talked about. I think it is declining, but it is declining not as quickly. And that creates a gap, right? And that gap is a interesting thing. There's many ways to describe that gap. Some may describe that gap as an opportunity. That's kind of what Kristian is saying for human laborers, is that if there's this bottleneck, there's this gap in measurability because of humans' general adaptability and experience and generality, humans are probably able to specialize to the verification component faster than we can get the machines to. And there's some interesting sort of deep challenges that make handling verification hard for machines in the short term. And the long term, I don't know that that's, I don't think that that's a permanent thing. But in the short term, that is definitely the case. Cryptography and blockchains are of”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bots sometimes come on a delegation of a human, so you need to treat them completely differently. As that unfolds, I think society will have to drastically reimagine its identity stack, the way it really certifies things, the way it thinks about is this true or not? What is the kind of the chain of custody of this digital item until the way it reaches me? And so, yes, I do think crypto probably is going to shine in all of this and everything that's been built over the last decade, it's going to be a lot more foundational. Back to verification, when you have underlying information on a blockchain, verification is cheap. It's more reliable. You can trust it. And so in a land where trust is going to be increasingly scarce, yes, I do think crypto primitives will finally truly shine across a number of applications.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we started this journey, I mean, mainly before us, I'd already said look LLNs and AI is kind of probabilistic, crypto is deterministic. Think about a smart contract, putting the guardrails on an agent or being able to give an agent the ability to buy and sell resources. All these things resonated. But I do think there's an even more profound complementarity between AI and crypto. And maybe the reason why it's not so salient in the economy today is because we haven't seen the side effects yet. But issues around think about identity or provenance of digital information. I think we're about to enter Bray Uncharted territory in the next few months as these capabilities become truly amazing. Every digital platform will have to really wrestle with the idea that what used to be a human contribution, whether it's a post or an image or anything else that's been done, it's now potentially an agent.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are individuals that are really good at understanding trends, societal changes, or things society cares about that require everybody to coordinate around something. Art is like that crypto networks to some extent are like that. And these meaning makers is essentially not, they're not in the land of what's measurable. We could land on one equilibrium or another. It doesn't really matter, but they're really good at creating that social coordination around some sort of outcome. These are not necessarily, by the way, the jobs that sometimes people say require human touch. I do think people severely overestimate. You know, how important that human touch is. You hear it for jobs like, you know, a therapist or even elderly or child care. Yes, I think people will have all sorts of concerns initially, but nobody is really accounting for the drastic reduction in cost, right? So if it's 100x.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With some of those effects, and there's going to be a massive need for retraining and really pushing people further up the knowledge frontier on that. But when you look at those jobs, we're going to use Olsai to verify AI. So one of the things that sometimes people misunderstand from the paper is that. We talk about human verification as the last step, but in many cases, AI will verify AI. So there's going to be a whole series of steps before it really gets to the final human that maybe or may not be needed depending on the job. And then we have a category that was the hardest one to qualify. I mean, we called them like the meaning makers. So imagine settings where actually it's all about, and here, again, my pasting crypto shows, it's all about consensus.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the cardifier's curse is what we describe as the mechanic where if you're a top verifier, you need to keep moving up the stack, right? Because the technology gets better and better. And so you need to keep adding value at that thin, thin layer so that you're always one step ahead of the machine, so to speak. The director I already mentioned, right, is essentially someone that really drives the intent. Entrepreneurs are directors, right? So they see some future, they imagine some path for getting there. And then, of course, startups are continuous drifting and realignment of the object along the way, right? There's many jobs that are director types, including, of course, in media, writing movie production. That's where we stole the title from. And then there's going to be jobs that I think we need to recognize are easy to automate, are easy to verify. And those shots are gone or soon to be gone. And I think society grasped.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple form in the past when people were labeling images for AI companies and training that's not needed anymore. Now you have big foundational labs hiring top experts from finance, top experts from different domains. Those people are creating the evals and the training that will eventually displace their peers. So this verification layer is a really important one. I think many people will tribe in it. It's one that really rewards almost like hyper specialization, right? So if you're the one person that really can deliver that final unlock, again, your leverage is massive. So that's one category, the verifier.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Middle, you're going to have a swarm of agents, and we're already seeing it. People are experimenting with all sorts of interesting new things. Of course, these are clunky, they break, they have all sorts of side effects. But, you know, the next iteration of this is going to be much more enterprise grade. And at the bottom of the sandwich, you're going to have an army or a small army of top verifiers. So if you think about all the agentic output coming out, if you empower those people with great tools, humans are not going to do verification, you know, but line by line. It's impossible. The throughput of the machines is accelerating too fast for that. But with the right tools, I think the top experts in every domain are going to be the ones ensuring that what was intended actually came out of the system. Super important job. One where I think domain experts will try it for a long time. But there's some bad news, right? So as you do that work, you're also kind of creating the labels for your displacement. And I think we've seen it in the most.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let's start there. I think there's actually a lot there in terms of what's still human across many dimensions. I would say the first one is, of course, verification. As these systems become more capable, the leverage that any single individual has in their profession is massive relative to what it was even in December. This means that probably we should all be more ambitious. We should all try to think through the workflows that we currently do. And in a nut to actually crypto, we call this the AI sandwich, a reference to the stablecoin sandwich. But the firm or a startup essentially can have one single UN, we call it a director, but it's essentially someone that is in charge of steering, verification, making sure that as the system drifts in directions that we're not intended, it can course correct. So that's maybe one person, maybe a small team at the top.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could talk near term because you break down the economy into three different areas where you can sort of find where you exist or where various tasks and jobs exist and understand their level of automatability or rather measurability in terms of their output and what they do. Maybe that's the best place to go through now because that gives you kind of a short-term, a near-term roadmap of how to think about this for each individual to think about. What they're contributing and what is likely to get eaten.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look in the paper, like we're trying to push it all the way to the limit. I do think the only path is actually human augmentation. And so as you think through again the shrinking space for verification, at some point it's all about intent. We're going to have some preferences and the machine may, by the way, have developed their own. Today, I think they develop quirks and preferences as a side effect of training often. And sometimes we understand them, sometimes we don't. But in the future, it is credible that as these systems become more and more capable, they will have preferences very much like we do. And so in that extreme, it's going to be a tension between our preferences and theirs. And the good news is that the underlying physical reality is the same. And so augmentation is going to be the only path, I think, where we can keep up with what we created. We will be able to still have a thoughtful conversation with it and try to play a part in it.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More fundamental, and that could be really pinned down to something precise. And so we think that as long as there's data underlying that information that you're trying to use to automate, you will be automated. And of course, AI also improves automation by giving us better measurement, right? Just think about vision and all the things that we can do today, sensors. AI is going to feed its own new data sets over time. But if it is not really captured anywhere, if it's still in somebody's brain just because they've seen all those out of distribution examples, they've seen those exceptions when Eddie launches this form of agents, he knows all the ways this could go wrong, right? It's like when you're building on crypto, there's just so much nuance in building a secure and safe system. That nuance is not yet fully captured.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or as a great curator, or they have good judgment. Well, one of the things that really inspired this paper was the idea that everyone was sort of coming up with all this scope around AI, which was like, oh, don't worry, the machine will never be able to do X, Y, and Z. And the code was very vague, right? How do you define taste, good taste or bad taste? How do you define good judgment versus bad judgment? And even worse, some of these things that needed judgment to Eddie's example in December a good engineer probably needed a lot more judgment applied than they need today when reviewing a code base. All those spaces are shrinking. And so we needed to go to the bottom of something that”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's the unknown unknowns are essentially the non measurable piece, often about the future. So that's why even if you throw agents today at the stock market, they'll probably be on average pretty good, maybe better than your financial advisor. But they will not be probably resilient to drastic changes in the environment, geopolitical shifts and whatnot. Those are things that are not measured. Of course, there's many more, right? And so web verification really is in this paper is the act of applying all of the embedded measurement that's in your brain as a human. So if you think about from birth to where you are professionally, you've seen all those sort of examples, situations, and you've learned from them. You essentially recorded measurement in your brain. And it's really only yours. Now, two people may have very similar knowledge, even career-wise, but it's not exactly the same combination. And so when people say, okay, this person has good taste.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That cost of automation is going down, and verification is actually an important cost in the economy throughout. So actually when we brought the simple economics of the blockchain, that also as a centerpiece on the cost of verification. Although I would say in this paper, it takes on a much broader idea. So what do we mean by custom verification? What is verification in this paper? In this paper, verification really starts from that idea about measurement. If you buy into the thesis that AI has been incredibly good at once it's given the right data, replicating that process. If you buy into that, then you start asking, okay, what's not measured today? And there's a lot of things that are not measured. Some are not measured because they're not really measurable. Economists call this all concept uncertainty after night. And it's essentially the difference between looking at the future and trying to assign probabilities around an event.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think the automation part is very intuitive. These agents essentially can do more and more of what's been done before. And for now, I think they're still somewhat constrained by the observable domain, right? So imagine every code base I've ever written that they've been ingesting during their training or fine-tuning. All of that is what they can build on. And often people say, oh, well, then they cannot innovate. They cannot be creative. They cannot have good taste. I actually strongly disagree. In fact, much of innovation is just recombination of ideas. And humans have only explored probably a tiny fraction of the possible recombinations between different disciplines, between different sciences, between different concepts. So I do think these agents will be extremely innovative just by taking what we've given them, essentially the unity of the knowledge that humans have accumulated to date that's being recorded and digitized and go with it.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calls this verification, or that's kind of like the catch all term for this bucket of not the mere automation, but this sort of incorporating what was made and writing what was made to suit some end goal, some purpose. So going back to your question, Robert, is the way things are changing is people are now grappling with that fact and realizing that maybe the split of work that is commanded from a great engineer has a different balance. The amount of attention paid to writing the code and just kind of printing one line at a time is smaller and vanishingly small for some, like in the vibe coding extreme, near zero. And a huge part of the work is now.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or it serves business goals, or it actually is handling prioritized tasks for the organization, right? This more nuanced concept of good. Yeah, or perhaps even that it surprises and delights you. Sure. And there's many dimensions to that task. And it seems that in the process of producing the code in the first place, engineers may not have considered that they were also doing this work too. They weren't just printing the code. They were doing this work too. And this process of truing the thing and writing it and guiding it and taking risks about it and deciding I'm going to experiment with this paper Chris wrote.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it turns out, and AIs help us understand this and break it out into its parts better, is that in the process of making the work, making the code, there is a very nuanced iterative process of correcting and straightening and feedback gathering and integrating that is not just the printing of each line of code in sequence, right? Like it is this holistic task. And it turns out the AIs are incredibly good at a lot of that and not so good at others. So the balance of work for a great engineer is shifting quickly. And the way that work is shifting is just kind of writing the code is plummeting, but making sure the code works or making sure the code is correct or not even correct isn't logically correct as in bug free. It's about that it provides value for the customer as they need it.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of a sudden, this sensation is very similar to the sensation of working with somebody, right? Where you didn't like kick forward what they did one piece at a time. That's ridiculous. That would be an extreme micromanagement. Instead, you have a conversation, they go away, they come back a day or two later, they've got something, hey, what do you think? And you provide feedback and go back and forth. So now it starts to feel like it's a coworker, right? And that qualitative feeling provokes a lot from the imagination. And now everyone is beginning to grapple with this reality. And part of grappling is just some histrionics. But another part of grappling, the more interesting part of grappling, is trying to figure out the ways to squeeze as much value in actual production settings and for commercial use as possible and what people are discovering, and this parlays right into Christian's paper, is that they produce an incredible amount of work.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is doing what I do, and I think that's both true and not true. In a sense, as we kind of surface in the paper, these tools, which for now are tools, but I think will become a lot more than just simple tools, are taking out the groundwork. They're taking out a lot of the exploration within what known. But we're still, I think, at the top, thinking through, okay, what is not known? Where can we push beyond the boundaries of what's been recorded, measured, digitized? And so those decisions, although they seem smaller, I think they have much higher leverage than we had before.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I think it was a long journey. It was many, many months of kind of thinking about some of these fundamental concepts. It came out, then I think my authors too, with a feeling that, first of all, this is a technology that is under our control, still at this point. Second, the upside, as I already kind of hinted at, is many orders of magnitude greater than what the doomers would want you to believe. And third, I think there's a playbook. There's a playbook that all of us can look at. We can think about where are we adding value? What are the sort of things that we do within our jobs tend to be bundles of different tasks and people get always very nervous when certain tasks or certain parts of their job get automated? I think right now coding is going through that experience where many talented individuals that have identified as developers, that have written elegant, fantastic code over the last few decades, look and say, oh, wow.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And essentially, what will the future look like now? We did a similar exercise back in 2013 when I went down the crypto rabbit hole. We wrote a simple economics of the blockchain. The simple in the title is just a trick. If you make it too intimidating, people will not read it. But very much like that time, look, some things will be right, some things will be wrong. Hopefully we got it directionally right. And part of the exciting phase right now is it's in the wild and people are kind of seeing what resonates and what doesn't.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say it was born like probably many others at the same time out of a semi existential crisis. We're all grappling with the fast pace of progress and just how quickly everything is moving. I'm an optimist. So look at all of this and can see kind of at the end of the arc really amazing things. But the fundamental question was like, what are we going to do? What should we focus on? What's worth of our attention, effort, and time, especially in this phase where we still, I think, have a meaningful shot at influencing the trajectory and really the technology. So we wrote actually some months ago a piece on measurement. And the basic idea of that piece was like, anything that can be measured will be automated, which doesn't sound like good news. But this second paper was really centered around, okay, if that is true, let's take that initial assumption to the limit. What would the economy look like? What will the nature of labor look like? What should startups do? What should incumbents do?”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just been told you have superpowers. You've just been told you can have multiple employees for $200 a month. What do you do? If I was a young person today starting off my career, I would try to convince my parents to give me some money to harness a huge swarm of computers and see like, can I spend $5,000 of compute productively? That's the challenge. We've been talking about a meme sort of in tech world for years now. The idea of like the one person billion dollar startup, right? Yeah. Is this not how that happens? What we're describing is exactly how that happens. There's a new surplus. Learn to exploit it. That is the lesson for a young person.”
2026-03-19 · a16z Podcast · AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source